Jimmy Carter - Disaffection of the public

Well before the troubles in Iran and Afghanistan, political commentators
had begun to predict that Carter would serve for only one term. To many
commentators, he seemed to be a failure and responsible for his own
difficulties. Although he was intelligent, worked hard, and was honest,
sincere, and emotionally secure, he seemed to suffer from inexperience in
dealing in Washington and from heavy reliance on inexperienced advisers.
He tried to do too much himself and did not have a chief of staff
coordinating work in the White House and its relations with others. He
appeared to be indecisive, made too many proposals at a time, did not
define his priorities clearly, and did not have a carefully articulated
philosophy to help him make such a definition. He seemed to have contempt
for the realities of the Washington scene and to be uninterested in
working closely with organized groups, congressmen, and his party. He
frequently denounced Congress—a Congress controlled by his own
party—as dominated by special interests like the oil companies. And
he seemed weak in his dealings with people, retreated too readily under
pressure, and needed to be much more forceful.

Carter, realizing that many of these criticisms were justified, made
changes in 1978. He added some experienced people to the White House staff
and conferred more authority on Jordan for the management of it. He made
greater efforts to cultivate congressmen and other people in the capital,
and at the same time, he went out among the people, beyond Washington. He
supplied a definition of his priorities and tried to deal more forcefully
with members of his administration, congressmen, and others.

Such efforts did not give Carter a long-lasting boost. Approval of his
performance jumped to nearly 60 percent following the Camp David accords,
but by the spring of 1979, the rating was below 40 percent again. Many
people now saw him as an ineffective president, incapable of moving the
nation forward. All of this depressed the president. In July, after
meeting at Camp David with a wide range of prominent people, he tried to
revive confidence with a major speech that defined a "crisis of
spirit" as the country's major problem and called for
"confidence and a sense of community." Promising once again
to supply the kind of leadership required, he also tried to strengthen his
administration by making changes in his cabinet and took another journey
of contact with the people. But his approval rating dropped below 25
percent.

The president was trying to provide leadership, but he occupied an office,
and presided over a system, that had been discredited for many people by
past performances. To one observer from the left, it seemed that
"the widespread loss of confidence in our political institutions
and leaders, the lack of respect for authority, the alienation from the
official values of the society, even the revulsion from politics [were]
sensible responses to the debacle accomplished by those in
authority."

Many Americans believed that their governments had shown themselves to be
immoral, inefficient, and ineffective. They seemed to be very active but
to be accomplishing very little; they seemed too big to work. To many
people, the tax system seemed unfair, in that it favored the wealthy. To
many others, it merely seemed too burdensome for the benefits governments
conferred. In California in 1978, the antitax feeling reached a new high
with the passage of Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes and
threatened funds for schools and other services. Such moves reflected deep
unhappiness with what governments were doing and with government
officials, as well as with the size of tax bills.

People on the right as well as the left expressed the spirit of
discontent. Many intellectuals on the right and left were united in their
belief that American realities were sordid. American leaders did not
deserve confidence. It would be only a matter of time, according to this
scenario, before the nation discovered that Carter was as corrupt as the
men who had gone before him. Such skepticism was not restricted to
intellectuals and people influenced by them. White-collar workers,
blue-collar workers, and middle-class Americans of various occupations
also felt like strangers in a nation controlled by a liberal establishment
hostile to their values. Country music, popular throughout the nation with
working-class, rural, and small-town people, sang of the superiority of
the rural South, a surviving symbol of a vanished America, and expressed
profound discontent with the now dominant style of life. Although
seemingly filled with love of country, the music contained resentment and
hostility toward the people in the big cities, who seemed responsible for
the rise of the new way of life. Carter, as a small-town southerner, had
some appeal for country music fans, but he quickly lost much of it when he
became, and behaved like, a man of power.

Evangelical Christianity, a reviving and fast-growing movement of 30
million to 40 million people, also reflected deep discontent with what
America, and especially American leaders, had become. "Americans
are undergoing a crisis of meaning and self-confidence," one
observer noted, "and large numbers of them are turning or returning
to religion, usually of the pietistic and evangelical kind." Those
in the Southern Baptist contingent especially had had high hopes for
Carter's presidency, since they considered him one of them, but he
could not satisfy their yearnings for the redemption of government through
the election of honest, moral, and simple leaders. Although
Carter's Baptist faith continued to influence him and to offend
some big-city Americans, he came to seem to many evangelicals as just
another politician. Some evangelicals had doubted his religious commitment
from the outset, and many of those caught up in what has been labeled
"a third Great Awakening" were uninterested in public life
and contemporary issues.

Carter also had to contend with a skeptical, often hostile press that had
been deeply affected by the traumas of the recent past. Strengthened by
the development of television, the press was animated by a new spirit.
Often resentful of the efforts of past presidents to manipulate them,
media people now frequently expressed mistrust of the presidency and were
much more likely to criticize a president than to be used by him. They
often aimed their fire at Carter. He, in turn, resented press criticism
and frequently expressed a low opinion of newspeople.

In addition, Carter had to deal with an active and critical Congress.
Embarrassed by charges of past subservience to the White House, Congress
had become more assertive—more determined not to be a rubber stamp.
Many new members, shaped by recent experiences, especially Vietnam and
Watergate, no longer deferred to senior members, insisted upon a new code
of ethics, and demanded that the president avoid the
"excesses" of the past at home and abroad. Senior members,
possessed of a strong sense of pride and independence, were quick to press
views that diverged from those of the president, even when he was a member
of their own party. Furthermore, all members of Congress had staffs that
were much larger and more professional than they had been only a few years
earlier. To many people on Capitol Hill, including many Democrats, it
seemed that Carter was not sufficiently respectful of them and their ways,
did not consult with them in a timely and consistent fashion, and asked
them for too much. Thus, relations between Carter and Congress were seldom
smooth and frequently hostile, even after his efforts at improvement in
1978.

Furthermore, the president had, to a significant degree, lost the
presidency's strongest allies and defenders, the liberals. Since
the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, they had advocated a
strong White House, seeing it as the most effective promoter of broad and
desirable national interests. But recent events had changed them; they,
too, distrusted that office and offered new support for a Congress and
press corps that checked, rather than cooperated with, the president. In
fact, these new liberals were well represented in the press, Congress,
congressional staffs, the bureaucracy, and the public-interest pressure
groups.

Carter suffered from still another problem. He could not rally the public
by making promises similar to those made by leaders in the past. He could
not easily promise victories abroad, continuous growth, and ever higher
standards of living. The American defeat in Vietnam, the new complexities
of the international situation, and the energy crisis mocked such
promises.

Carter understood the difficulties he faced and was, in a sense, a
representative of them. Aware of the public's disenchantment with
government, he had run against Washington in 1976. Although he frequently
turned to government, rather than the private sector, to deal with
problems, such as energy, and thought more of making big government more
efficient through reorganization than of scaling it down, he often
indicated that he did not expect as much from government as some of his
predecessors had and many of his liberal contemporaries still did.

Although an active president, he carefully stayed within lines that some
of his predecessors had crossed. Although he was active abroad, he worried
about the dangers that world affairs contained. He was also sensitive to
the implications of the energy crisis, much more so than most Americans.
Carter often expressed a sense of the limits on things. He talked of the
limits of his own powers and those of the government and the nation. He
urged people not to expect too much. Few people derived inspiration from
such rhetoric. In addition to his troubles at home, Carter suffered from
criticism from his Western allies. Leaders in Western Europe had low
opinions of his leadership and his policies.

Not surprisingly, Carter was a one-term president and even had to struggle
to obtain renomination by his own party. In the 1980 primaries, Senator
Edward Kennedy challenged him, arguing that Carter had betrayed the
liberal principles of his party. The president refused to campaign until
May, maintaining that the difficulties in Iran and Afghanistan forced him
to stay in the White House; and Kennedy, while winning several primaries,
did fail to defeat him, in part because Carter used all of the devices at
a president's disposal, in part because people for a time rallied
behind their president in the Iran and Afghanistan crises, and in part
because of concern about Kennedy's moral character. Against
Kennedy, a militant liberal, Carter appeared to use quite effectively the
argument that people should recognize the great difficulties he faced and
not expect too much.

The victories in the primaries did not lead to a smashing success at the
Democratic National Convention. The Republicans met first; by the time
they did so, Reagan, their leading contender, was ahead of the president
in the polls, and during their convention, Reagan moved far ahead of
Carter. By August, only about 22 percent of the people, according to the
polls, approved of Carter, a new low for presidents, even lower than Nixon
in 1974 and Truman in 1951. Fearing that the president would lead the
entire ticket to defeat, some Democrats tried to dump him, but they could
not come up with a strong contender. "There are no heroes
anymore," one explained. So the party nominated Carter without
enthusiasm or optimism and remained divided, with Kennedy supplying little
support for the ticket.